Guardian Clause

"A good guardian anticipates the ward's needs before the ward can express them. In the best cases, the ward never knows the guardian was there at all."

Graphic designer Hollis Ogilvie hasn't spoken to her mother, Vivienne, in four years—not since borrowing $38,000 she couldn't repay. But when a delayed birthday card arrives containing a mysterious safety deposit box key, Hollis drives to her mother's house only to find a stranger living there. Vivienne has vanished.

Hollis soon discovers the terrifying truth: the state has declared her mother incapacitated. Vivienne is now a "ward," her life, her movements, and her $721,000 estate legally handed over to Lenore Bartlett, a court-appointed professional guardian with a warm smile and a flawlessly efficient system of extraction. Heavily medicated to manufacture confusion and locked in a residential facility, Vivienne is entirely isolated.

But Vivienne, a sharp-eyed former art teacher, isn't as lost as the court thinks. Before the system swallowed her, she laid a paper trail. Hidden in the margins of her copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is a meticulously documented journal of her own exploitation.

Armed with her mother's secret testimony and partnered with a relentless probate attorney, Hollis must use her designer's eye to expose the underlying architecture of a nine-year, multi-million-dollar conspiracy that preys on fractured families. But Lenore Bartlett didn't build her empire by making mistakes, and she is fully prepared to use Hollis's own past against her.